Introduction

Orage is a time-managing application of the
Xfce 4 Desktop Environment
. It includes a calendar window, list of events and day view.
Orage has several kinds of alarms and is ical compatible so that you can
transfer appointments from other calendar systems into Orage or vica versa.
It also provides an easy way to archive and manage your old appointments.

Getting started

Orage is started by typing orage on the command line or in the run
application window. The command line accepts some options like -v, which
tells the version and -h, which shows short usage help. You can also start
orage by clicking on the item orage in the submenu "Office" from the
desktop menu. Another handy way of starting orage is to click button 1 on
orageclock panel plugin. But usually orage is started automatically as
part of Xfce startup.

The first thing you should do is to adjust your
preferences.
Before adding any appointments, it is strongly recommended to set your
local timezone.

Figure 1. Orage menu item in the desktop menu

When you run orage, you will first see the calendar window appearing.

The calendar window

Figure 2. Default Calendar window

The calendar window provides you a menu bar giving access to different
functions.
Below that is a standard calendar showing the month, the year, day names
and week numbers. At the bottom there is small window showing active
TODOs and EVENTs on the selected day.

The File menu

Exchange data: creates window where you can do file level operations
to orage data. (1) import and export appointments between
orage and operating system files or 2) rename orage files or 3) add
and remove foreign calendar files.);

Close: hide the calendar window but keep orage running in the
background;

Quit: end orage;

The Edit menu

Figure 4. Edit menu in the calendar window

The Edit menu gives you access to the settings window, which will be
explained later.

The View menu

Figure 5. View menu in the calendar window

The View menu has three choices:

View selected date: show the event list of currently selected date;

View selected week: show the day window starting from current day;

Select today: set calendar's selected day to be today;

The Help menu

Figure 6. Help menu in the calendar window

The Help menu has also two choices:

Help: show this help file;

About: show information about the version and authors and license;

The calendar

Calendar view presents you one month, which you can change by pressing
the arrow beside the month name or the year number or using the mouse
wheel.
Days where you have appointments or where you have
Ending TODO are marked as bold. One day is always
selected and shown with a block. You can change the selected day by
single clicking any day number. Double clicking a day number causes
event list window for that day to be activated (or day list if you
changed your preferences).

The TODO list

The bottom window lists your active TODOs. You can scroll to see
them all. Red means the TODO is late (due date has passed). Blue means
that the TODO is active (start time has passed, but you still have time
before the due time passes). And black means a future TODO.
You can edit TODOs by double clicking the row. All rows have tooltips,
which show more details about the TODO.

The EVENT list

Below the TODO list you see your events from the selected date. (Or from
several days depending on your settings in the preferences.) Check the
tooltip for more details of the event. Also events can be edited by
double clicking them.

The event list window

Figure 7. Orage event list window

The event list (or appointment list as it is also called) window shows all
activites that you have reserved for the day (date is shown in the window
heading in your locale format).
On top of the window you have menu and buttons to do actions.
This is your main activity window and you may want to keep it up all the
day and even make it to appear on all workspaces or to be always on top
of other windows.

The button bar

Duplicate: also start an
appointment window for creating a new appointment for
this day. But do not start from scratch, but copy all values
from the active row in the appointment list below. Note that
if you do not have any rows selected from the event list, this
button does not do anything (but gives a warning);

Delete: remove all selected appointments. There is no undo, so be
carefull with this button! Before removing anything Orage asks for
your verification.

Back: show previous day;

Today: show today;

Forward: show next day;

Refresh: redisplay this date;

Find: activate the search tab;

Close: close this window;

Dayview: start day list window;

The tabs

Each of the four tabs selects the type of appointments to show.
There may also be extra selections possible depending on the tab.
You can select tab by clicking it or by using the mouse wheel.
Let's check each tab:

Event: the event tab shows all EVENT type appointments happening on
this day. It is possible to see more than one day in this tab
by setting "Extra days to show" number to larger than 0.
(You can change the default 0 in the preferences dialog.) Each number
shows one more day. (It causes the Time column in the event listing
to show also the date.)

Todo: shows your active TODOs similarly than in the main calendar
window. Only active ones are shown. If you want to see old TODOs,
you need to find them in Search tab.

Journal: lists your notebook entries starting from certain date.
Default start date is one year back and you can not change the
default setting.

Search: enter a free text, which is searched from all the appointments.
Usually the search is case independent, but for some utf8 characters
Orage switches to case sensitive search method. This happens if the
length of the string is different in upper case compared to lower case
(for example German language double s causes this).

The appointment list

The list shows all appointments satisfying the conditions and tab type.
Scrollbars will appear if there are more lines or longer lines than
what fits into the window. You can edit any appointment by double
clicking the row. Each line has three fields:

Time: the starting and ending times of the appointment (the format
varies depending on tab and appointment). All times are always shown
in your local timezone. It is possible to define special whole day
appointments and they have a text "All day" instead of real start and
end times. Rows appear in start time order.
+sign in front of the time means that the appointment started on some
previous day and correspondingly +sign at the end of the time means
that appointment continues and ends later than the selected day.
If the Event tab shows today, there are few extra formattings used:
When the event has passed, it is overstriked. Currently active
events are shown with blue colour and future events are bold.

Flags: gives information about the appointment. If your appointment
has a category which has been associated with a clour, flags field has
that colour background. (Note that the explanations are visible as
a hint when you move your cursor into the appointment list.)
There are five flags in order:

Alarm: what kind of action happens when alarm time passes.
n means no alarm has been defined.
A means that visible window is raised.
S means that sound is played.
(If both visual and sound alarm is defined, S is shown)

Recurrence: how often is that appointment happening.
n means no repeating so that this event only
happens once.
D means daily repeat,
W weekly,
M monthly and
Y yearly.

Type: what kind of reservation is this. Two options:
f means free so that the action is not reserving
the time and it is possible to schedule more appointments at the
same time and respectively
B means busy, so that
nothing else can be done at this time. Note that current
version of orage does not enforce these and the flag is only as a
comment (in the future this may be enforced).

File: where this appointment is stored.
O means it is in the standard active Orage file,
A in the archive file. (The appointment is
automatically unarchived if it is edited.). Archived appointments
can only be found in the Search and Journal tabs.
F appointment is in foreign file; in other words
it is not native Orage appointment.

Appointment type:
E for EVENT,
T for TODO and
J for JOURNAL.
This flag is usefull only in search tab since the tab name
informs the type in other tabs.

Title: the heading of the appointment. Note that the whole title is
shown, so you may want to avoid using too long titles to keep the view
cleaner.

The day list window

Figure 8. Orage day list window

The day list window shows all events that you have reserved for the
next days. Default is to show 7 days, but you can change that and see
up to 40 days at once.
On top of the window you have menu and buttons to do actions.
This is another form of your main activity window and more usefull than
event list window if you want to find room for your new events or see your
agenda and free time from longer perod than one day.

The parameters

Below the buttonbar are the two settings. You can change the
start day of the day list and the number of days shown.

The day list

Biggest part of the window is the day list area. You can click the
header of the day to open
event list window
for that day. First line contains full day events when defined. The other
lines contain events that you have scheduled. Each event has tooltip
which include appointment details. You can update the event by double
clicking it. Events are placed on the start time row and even if the
length is several hours, the event is only visible on single row. If
the event is taking time (availability=Busy), there is vertical line
in front of it showing its length. These lines show how full your
calendar is and makes it easier to find free time quickly. If more than
one event starts at the same hour, they all are added to the same row /
column after each other and the reservation line is the overlap of them.

The appointment window

The appointment window is used to add, edit and delete appointments.
It is the most complex window in orage, but most fields still have good
default values and are not mandatory. It has button bar (All actions are
also available in menus above the buttons) and three tabs controlling
basic settings and alarms and recurrence settings.

The button bar

There are 5 activity buttons in the button bar from left to right:

Save: store the appointment to the orage system. This causes
also data validity checking.

Save and close: like Save, but also closes the window.

Revert: undo all changes done after previous save. Note that
this button is active only after data has been changed.

Duplicate: start creating new appointment and copy all values
from the current activity into it. The new appointment is not created
until you press Save.

Delete: remove current appointment permanently from orage
system.

The general tab

Figure 9. Orage appointment window - general tab

In this tab, you define the contents of the appointment.

Type

Orage can handle three types of appointments:

Event is something that happens sometimes. It has start and
end time. This is the most common appointment type and you
actually can handle all cases with this, since it also is the
most flexible type. So if you are not sure what type to choose,
Event is your best bet. Events either reserve your time
(Availability=Busy) or are free which means this event does not
take time from your schedule.

Todo is some action that you need to complete. It
usually has a start time and due time when it has to be finished.
It has no end time, which is replaced by the due time. You can
also use duration similarly than with events. Todos have no
availability, but instead they have completed time. After you
set the completed time, the todo is done and is removed from
lists visible in main calendar and in todo appointment tab.

Journals are just notes. They do not have end times nor
availability. It is not possible to add alarm or recurrency for
journals.

Title

The title of the appointment. It appears in the event list
and also in the alarm window and is listed at the header of this
window. It should be a rather short summary of the appointment.

Location (Event and Todo)

This field should describe where the event happens. It can
be for example Home or Office or Paris depending on what kind of
appointment you have. It is also possible to leave it empty. orage
is not using it in any special way, nor is it visible anywhere
else than here. Journals do not have location.

All day event

Selecting this checkbox causes so called whole day appointment
to be defined. These do not have start nor end time defined, but
it is possible that the event lasts several days. Start time is
assumed to be the beginning of the day at 00:00 and end date
at the last day at 24:00.

Start

Defines the start time of the appointment. First, press the
date button and choose the date from the calendar. After that
you set the hour and minute using either your mouse wheel or
clicking the small arrows. It is also possible to type the
numbers directly to the fields. Hours go from 0 to 23 (24 is not
allowed value).

The last button is timezone. Default value for new
appointments is your current timezone, which you have set in the
preferences. It is recommended to use real timezones instead of
floating. You should not mix floating with real timezones although
it is possible. Floating means that time is not bound to any
timezone, but varies according to current settings. Modifying
either the default timezone or start timezone may cause floating
values to change.

End (Event)

Similar to Start, but defines naturally the ending time. Note
that start and end timezones may be different (for example when
you schedule a meeting in abroad you can set the starting time in
your local timezone and the rest of the timings in the destination
timezone).
Event list window
always shows times in your local time. Only events have end time.

Due (Todo)

Similar to End, but defines the time where the todo should be
completed. Only todos have due time.

Duration (Event and Todo)

Often it is easier to set the appointment duration instead of
ending (or due) time. You can do that by marking the first box
here. It is not possible to have both end/due time and duration
at the same time, so end/due time setting will be unavailable
after you select duration.
Maximum duration is 1000 days, which is almost three years. Note
that although the minute selection jumps 5 minutes at a time, you
can manually enter any number.

Availability (Event)

What kind of reservation is this. There are two possiblities:
Free means that the action is not reserving
the time and it is possible to schedule more appointments at the
same time and respectively Busy means that
nothing else can not be done at this time. Note that current
version of orage does not enforce these menings and the flag is
only as a comment (in the future this may be checked).

Completed (Todo)

By selecting the Done box you mark this todo as done. The completed
time can then be set. Format is similar to other times (like
Start). Only todos have completed time.

Categories

Free format text, which you can use to categorize your appointment.
It is also possible to create a list of categories and associate
those to colours. You can then pick one of those and get your
appointment to be shown with that colour in the event list window.

Priority

Priority of the appointment. orage is not using this, so treat it
just like a comment.

Note

Free format text, where you can and should explain more
the appointment. It is shown in the alarm window. Scrollbars
appear when needed.

The alarm tab

Figure 10. Orage appointment window - alarm tab

In this tab, you define the alarm for the appointment. orage supports
three kinds of alarms: window, sound and procedure, but they all happen
at the same time. It is possible to define only one alarm time for each
appointment. To cause an alarm you need to do two things: You have to
define alarm time and select alarm type. By default alarm happens 5
minutes before the appointment start time. Default alarm is Orage
window without sound.

Alarm time is set if any of the alarm timing numbers is non zero (in
other words there is no special flag to set alarm; just define the time
for it. This also prevents setting alarm to happen exactly at the
appointment start/end time). You need explicitely select each alarm type
by crossing the Use box. If you do not choose any alarm types, the alarm
does not happen.

Alarm time

Define how much earlier or later the alarm happens. If all numbers
are zero, no alarm is raised for this appointment. The last field
defines what these alarm offset numbers mean. You can define alarm
to happen based on start or end time of the appointment and also
if it happens after or before the time. Default is to alarm
before the start time of the appointment. But specially for todos
it is often more usefull to raise alarm before the due (=end) time.

Persistent alarm

When orage is not running (for example if your computer is shutdown)
alarms can't happen. If you want to get reminders after orage
starts again, you need to set the alarm as persistent. By default
alarms are just lost.

Sound

Define the sound file to be played when the alarm fires.
Leaving this empty disables sound alarm. Remember to define the
actual play command in the
preferences dialog.
You should also test that your system can play the filetype you
choose there. Simply start a terminal and test it using the
command you specified and the sound file.

By default alarm sound is played only once, but you can make it
repeated by choosing the box next line. You can also define how
many time it is repeated and what is the interval. Be carefull
to set the interval longer than the length of the sound since
orage does not wait for the previous sound to end before starting
the next sound after the interval.
Note that there is a silence button in visual alarms, so that you
can stop the noise, but that only prevents the next play to happen,
it does not interrupt currently playing alarm, which you should
remember when using long lasting soundfiles.

Visual

orage can show two kinds of internal visual alarms. Orage window
is a small alarm window showing the heading and note text.
Notification is more fancy notification using libnotify. You need
to have libnotify installed before you can define notification
kind of visual alarm. orage -v shows if you
have libnotify support included.

Procedure

This makes it possible to use external alarms. You can run any
operating system command or script. Common use for this is sending
email.

Execute

You can test your alarm by pressing this. It raises the alarms
immediately so that you can listen the sounds and see the windows.

Default alarm

You can either set alarm back to default options or you can store
current settings to be default alarm for all new appointments.
There is only one default alarm, which applies to all appointments.

The recurrence tab

Figure 11. Orage appointment window - recurrence tab

In this tab you can define repeating appointments. Often it makes
sense that the same appointment happens every day or every month instead
of creating a new appointment for each event. Note that orage does not
support exclusion day ranges (like you would like to skip holiday period
from you work related appointments), so you have to end the whole
recurrency and enable it again after it need to resume. orage also
misses the possibility to modify only one specific event from a
recurring set. All changes affect the whole set of appointments.

Complexity

Default is Basic and that makes it possible to define frequency
and limit of the appointment only. Often that is enough and these
settings are very easy and fast to do even if you are not familiar
with calendars and alarms. Selecting Advanced gives you more
possibilities and makes it possible to build complex recurrent
appointments like for example:

Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Last Tuesday on every second month.

Frequency

This is the base repeating period. Default is no repeat (=None)
and other possibilities are daily, weekly, monthly and yearly.

The next selection makes it possible to easily skip some periods.
Default value is 1 and it means every time as specified in the
Frequency selection. 2 means every second time and 3 every third
time etc. For example if you want to schedule your meeting to
happen every third week, select Frequency = Weekly and set Interval
to 3. (Starting time is selected in the
General tab
and next event happens exactly 3 weeks from that)

Limit

orage allows you also to limit the repeating count:

Repeat forever: this is default and does not limit the
number of occurrences at all.

Repeat n times: the appointment is scheduled exactly n
times. After that it ends (but is not removed).

Repeat until date: you can select the last date when this
event happens. Note that it still happens normally during this
date.

Weekdays (Advanced)

Default is that all days are checked, which means that the event
happens normally every day. By removing any check, you prevent
the appointment to happen on that day. In other words, your
appointment only happens on checked weekdays. The most natural
usage of this is to use it with Frequency = Daily. You may want
to have a chat meeting for example each Monday and Wednesday. You
can do this by selecting Frequency = Daily and by checking only
Weekdays Mon and Wed.

Selecting Weekly or Monthly actually causes the same thing.
Deselecting any weekday for weekly or monthly or yearly repeating
appointments causes all the remaining weekdays to become selected
even though the original repeating selection only selects one day
from the period. This is needed so that it is possible to schedule
for example a meeting to happen every second week on Tuesday and
Friday (Frequency = weekly, Interval = 2, Weekdays = Tue and Fri).

Which day (Advanced)

This setting can only be used for monthly and yearly repeating
events. It can be used to select which weekday from the month or
year is selected. For example if you want to schedule your
meeting to happen on the first Tuesday of every month, you can first
select Frequency = Monthly and then check only Tuesday from Weekdays
and finally set this "which day" number to be 1 (choose the number
located below Tuesday). Negative numbers count backwards starting
from the end of period and zero means that this setting is not used.
Frequency = Yearly, weekdays = Thursday only clicked and which say =
-2 means second last Thursday of the year.

Exceptions

Here is list of exception times. - sign at the end of the row means
exclusion where the appointment does not happen even though it was
included in the repeat set. + sign means it is extra time to
do the appointment.

You can remove the exception by double clicking it in the listing
window. You can add new exception by first selecting the type
(either excluded or included times) and then double clicking a day
in one of the calendars below.

(Note that even though excluded time should be date, it can be shown
as time in some systems. This is a way to workaround a bug where
some calendar backend systems are not able to handle full date
exclusions properly.)

Action dates

Three small helper calendars, which show when the appointment
will happen next. They show real time data, which is not stored
in the system until you press save button.

The exchange data window

The exchange data window is used to control physical files of orage.
It is possible to import files having calendar data or just use those
files as they are (foreign). It is also possible to export appointments
from orage to operating system files and change the names of orage data
files.

The import export tab

Figure 12. Orage exchange window - import/export tab

Import

Enter the name of the file which you want to copy into orage.
You can do several files in a row by separating names with comma.
After you have the file name in place, press Save and orage reads
the contents in. After the file has been imported, those
appointmenst are part of orage and can't be differentiated or
put back into the file.

You can also import foreign files from the operating system using
command line. This feature can be used to import ical files
directly from the web by telling the browser (like firefox) that
the action is to start orage

Export

Enter the name of the file where you want orage to write
appointments. You can choose either all appoinments or just a
list of ids. Pressing save causes the appointments to be read and
written to the external file. (The appointments are are not
deleted from orage but are kept in it also.)

Archive

You can either revert all archived appointments back to the main
orage file or force archiving. It is good idea to revert archive
if you do exports since export does not look data from archive
file.

The orage files tab

Figure 13. Orage exchange window - orage files tab

Orage files

It is possible to relocate and rename both active orage file
and the passive archive file. Pressing save does the actual action.
There are 3 options for these actions:

Rename: the safest choice. It only updates the file name in
orage internal structures. It does not touch operating system
files at all. The new file has to exist before this operation
can be done. First copy the file in you operating system
and then you can change the name.

Copy: another safe choice. File is copied first into the new
place followed by the internal rename described above.

Move: File is moved first into the new place followed by the
internal rename described above. Note that the original file
does not exist in the original place anymore after this change.

The foreign files tab

Figure 14. Orage exchange window - foreign files tab

Foreign files

orage can include and maintain other than its main data file.
It is possible to add (and remove) so called foreign files. They
behave similarly than base data file, but they remain isolated,
so that it is easy to move them back to the original system
where they came from. This is mainly meant to be used when you
need to maintain your calendar also in other than orage. Sometimes
it is good idea to mark the file as read only, which prevents
you from modifying any of the appointments in the corresponding
file. (Orage uses some private ical components, which are not
necessarily understood by the other system, so updates may cause
problems for the other tool.)

You can also add foreign files from the operating system using
command line: orage --add-foreign file

The preferences window

The preferences window is used to enter initial values for orage.
You can define for example several display options, how old appointments
should be archived and what is the command to be used for playing
sound alarms and also you can set the local timezone for orage.

The main tab

Figure 15. Orage preferences window - main tab

Timezone

You should always set the default timezone for orage. It is
possible to use also floating times, but then all times should be
in floating form. It is a bad idea to mix floating and timezone
times. Floating times tend to move to follow any timezones they
see...

Archive threshold

orage does not delete appointments automatically, so usually your
calendar file grows bigger and because of that orage gets slower
and takes up more memory from the system. Enabling automatic
archiving causes old appointments to be moved from the active
calendar file to passive history file after the selected time.
This helps to keep the active file smaller and the application in
good shape. Archiving is enabled by setting the threshold to other
than 0 value. Of course it is also possible to manually delete
appointments, but that removes them permanently and you will not
be able to find them later.

Note that orage also splits
recurring appointments
so that if the original start date is older than threshold, that
appointment is added to the archive file and the starting date in
the active calendar file is updated to contain only values more
recent than the threshold. This also saves time when orage is
searching recurrent events.

Sound command

Here you can define which sound command orage uses when playing
sound files. Try testing some common commands like play or aplay
from terminal to see what works in your system. You probably do
not want to use full version of totem or mplayer since they will
cause a video window also to appear and that most probably is not
what you want.

Basically it is possible to do other than sound commands also since
orage really only starts this program and gives it
the sound file
as parameter. But this is not the intention of this feature.

The display tab

Figure 16. Orage preferences window - display tab

In this tab you can define visibility options for the
main window of orage.

Show borders

You can hide window borders and make the calendar window
smaller by unselecting this option. This frees more space to your
other applications from your workspace.

Show menu

By unselecting this you can leave out the menubar in the top of
the calendar window.

Show month and year

Select whether you want to see month and year controls in
the main calendar window.

Show day names

Controls day names visibility on top of the calendar window.

Show week numbers

Controls visibility of week numbers on left of calendar.

Show todo list

You can hide TODO list in the main calendar by deselecting this.

Number of days to show in event window

You can hide EVENT list in the main calendar by setting this to
zero. Non zero values means the number of days to show events for.

Set sticked

Show calendar window on all workspaces by selecting this.

Set on top

Keep calendar window on top of all other windows.

Show in taskbar

Controls if calendar is visible in the taskbar.

Show in pager

Controls if calendar is visible in the pager.

Show in systray

Controls if calendar is visible in the systray. A small
icon is presented in the systray if this is selected. It is
recommended that you enable this feature. By clicking this icon
orage is toggled visible or hidden. If you do not have orage in
the systray, you have two other options to make the main calendar
window visible: You can either click Orage-clock panel plugin
or you can start orage again.

Calendar start

It is possible to define that orage starts in the background or
as minimized. This option only affects the start of orage.

The extra tab

Figure 17. Orage preferences window - extra tab

Select always today

Controls which day is selected after orage main
calendar window is hidden
and comes visible again (for example by clicking orageclock panel
plugin). Default value is off, which means that previously
selected day will remain selected. Crossing this causes
current date instead being selected.

Use dynamic tray icon

Setting this causes orage to use dynamic icon in taskbar (if you
have taskbar and you have selected to use taskbar in the Display
tab). Note that this icon is used also other places where icon
is used.
Dynamic icon includes real month day number and also shows weekday
in the top and month name at the bottom. (orage uses appreviations
if real names are too long to fit to the available space.)
You can revert back to old static icon by deselecting this.

Main Calendar double click shows

You can define to start either the event list (=appointment list)
or the day view window when you double click day numbers in the
main calendar window.

Eventlist window

Define how many days to show in the event list when it starts.
(It is possible to change the number in the event list window.)

Undocumented Features

Some hidden options allow you to customize orage behaviour. You can find
and change those in ~/.config/orage/oragerc.
You must be carefull not to change the format of this file or orage may
not start anymore. All the other settings are in the same file.
Undocumented settings are:

Main Window Position (Main window X, Main window Y)
and Size (Main window size X, Main window size Y): normally you do
not want to change these. It is the location and size of
calendar window
in the screen. orage updates this automatically, so your setting will be
overwritten.

Event Window Position (Eventlist window pos X, Eventlist window pos Y)
and Size(Eventlist window X, Eventlist window X): normally you do
not want to change these. It is the location and size of
event list window
in the screen. orage updates this automatically, so your setting will be
overwritten.

Logging level: normally you do not want to change this. It can be used
to control how much information orage prints to the screen or log
file ~/.xsession-errors. Message number are:

negative= Debug (Note that special debug code needs to be linked
into orage before these message are in use)

0-99 = Message (startup and update modification messages
for example)

100-199 = Warning

200-299 = Critical warning

300- = Error (these cause orage to abort)

Ical week start day: Defines what is the first day of week in libical.
Note, that it is only used in weekly repeating
appointments. It will not change the
calendar view anyway. orage tries is best to find this setting
automatically, but if your weekly repeating appointments seem to be
wrong, you can try to set this. 0 = Monday, 1 = Tuesday...

Priority list limit: Day view listing only shows appointments, which have
priority smaller than this limit. It is adviced to keep it as a high
value or you will not see all your appointments in the day view window.

This really is a problem in your distro. You can check how your
operating system reports these to GTK+ and hence to orage, which
uses strictly gtk calendar widget and does not tune these settings
itself. Command locale first_weekday shows
which day is the first day in your system. Usually Sunday is day
number 1, but that can be changed so check that with command
locale day, which shows days starting from day
number 1. You may try with different LANG enevironment variable
settings and calendar view in orage should change accordingly. Log
a new bug for orage if you think it is not working correctly.
Look more information from
Xfce bug 1237
or from
Debian bug 215466

If you are adventurous, you can actually fix these yourself. You
need to find your locale definition file (like fi_FI or fr_FR).
locate is your friend here and helps finding it.
After that you can check what the setting is:
grep first_weekday fi_FI and change that if it is
wrong and after that you need to recompile your locale database.

1.2.

How can I insert my ical file into orage?

You can do this with so called foreig files. Add your file as
a foreign file and orage will use it. Or you can import the file
and orage includes the appointmemts (After this you can not tell
the difference anymore, so you can not easily move them back to
where they came form.)

1.3.

How can skip my repeating appointment from happening during some
period of time?

This is common requirement. You may for example have work related
meetings happening every week and when you are on holiday you would
not like to get alarmed by those nor would you like to see those.
The iCal standard uses term "Exception Dates" for this kind of
feature, but unfortunately orage does not include that feature.
The easiest way probably is to end those appointment with end date
and then after the holiday remove the end date again.

orage has excluded date feature, so you can exclude full days, but
only one day at a time. orage still does not support excluded periods.

1.4.

I have found a bug in orage or would like to see a new feature. How
can I inform that to the developers?

You should file a bug into
Xfce bugzilla
or send an email to
<xfce4-dev@xfce.org> Xfce development. Please, remember
to include your full orage version (preferable the results from
orage -v or look the version from the about
window).

1.5.

I upgraded to Orage 4.6 or 4.8 from Orage 4.4 and now my old
appointments are missing. Are they permanently lost?

Since version 4.6 orage uses different default location for
appointments than the previous version. And there is no automatic
upgrade partly because it is safer to leave the old data as it is
in case you need revert back. orage 4.6 appointments are not
compatible with older orage. You can however copy your old file to
the new place or export its contents. You can do that either manually
from operating system (make sure orage is not running) or using the
interface menus.
Old default location (in 4.4) is
~/.config/xfce4/orage/orage.ics
and new location (after 4.6) is
~/.local/share/orage/orage.ics